Obama agenda: Are you better off?

Are you better off? No, President Obama says: “I don’t think that they’re better off than they were four years ago,” Obama said in an interview with ABC. “They’re not better off than they were before Lehman’s collapse, before the financial crisis, before this extraordinary recession that we’re going through. I think that what we’ve seen is that we’ve been able to make steady progress to stabilize the economy but the unemployment rate is still way too high.”

A majority think President Obama will not win reelection. They say so by a 55%-37% margin in a Washington Post/ABC poll.

A CBS poll finds: “Sixty-nine percent say the president has not made real progress on the economy, which voters overwhelmingly cite as their most important issue. Twenty-five percent say he has made real progress. Perceptions are not improving. The percentage who said Mr. Obama has made real progress has dropped 10 points from a survey 13 months ago, when 35 percent said he had made real progress.”

“The White House sent three pending trade agreements to Congress on Monday after reaching a deal with House Republican leaders,” The Hill reports. “The agreement will allow trade pacts with South Korea, Colombia and Panama to move forward, in addition to legislation to help workers who are hurt by increased trade.”

“A Silicon Valley investor and senior administration officials warned the White House to reconsider having President Obama visit a solar start-up company because of its mounting financial problems, saying he might be embarrassed later,” the Washington Post reports.

Obama, though, said he didn’t regret the Solyndra loan, per The Hill: "No, I don't, because if you look at the overall portfolio of loan guarantees that have been provided, overall it's doing well."

“Protests against Wall Street spread across the country yesterday as demonstrators marched on Federal Reserve banks and camped out in parks from Los Angeles to Portland, Maine, in a show of anger over the wobbly economy and what they see as corporate greed,” the Boston Globe reports. “In Manhattan, hundreds of protesters dressed as “corporate zombies’’ in white face paint lurched past the New York Stock Exchange clutching fistfuls of fake money. In Chicago, demonstrators pounded drums in the city’s financial district. Others pitched tents or waved protest signs at passing cars in Boston, St. Louis, and Kansas City, Mo.”